Month: January 2026

Exploring Identity and Survival in “Avatar 3: A Journey of Relocation” | January 06 2026, 17:34

After watching Avatar 3, we decided to rewatch the first and second movies. Watched it like it was the first time, but here’s what I thought.

For the family, relocation was an urgent rescue from physical annihilation or forced participation in a war. Moving, they encountered the necessity to “learn to swim” in a new legal, linguistic, and social environment, starting from scratch and losing their former social weight. The feeling of “we are strangers here” is the central emotion. Severance of ties with friends and colleagues, only the “nuclear family” remains as the sole island of identity. Essentially, Jake’s decision to flee to save his children is the fundamental dilemma of any parent in a conflict zone: fight to the end on their own land or leave to preserve the life of the next generation.

Upon arrival, they hardly receive a visa, and permanent residency isn’t promised. But eventually, it becomes clear that it’s impossible to hide from a global conflict geographically. Sooner or later one has to participate in protecting their new “reef.”

Jake’s children and he himself have five fingers, whereas purebred Na’vi have four. Plus, the accent. This is a constant visual reminder of their origin. Even if you are fully integrated, there is always a detail that marks you as an outsider. Your children may become “one of them” faster, but they still carry the mark of “hybridity.”

By the way, in the third part, all the blues already speak English. The Na’vi language was completely displaced by them.

P. S. By the way, it’s interesting that Jake didn’t bring any of humanity’s achievements to the new culture of Pandora at all. I don’t know, the wheel, fire, medicine, some mechanical stuff. Nothing.

A Decade at EPAM: Thriving Through Change and Challenge | January 05 2026, 13:43

10 years at EPAM.

I would have never thought that I would enjoy working in the same place for an entire decade. What’s the secret? At EPAM, I am always evolving: projects change one after another, never letting me get bored.

I am currently on a project at a giant company: over 100 thousand employees and revenue of 30 billion dollars. Before this, it was the automotive industry — a behemoth with a staff of 175 thousand and a turnover of 150 billion. Somewhere around, there was a contract with a company of 80 thousand employees and 35 billion in revenue. True scale and genuinely serious challenges. And earlier, there were cosmetics brands, biotech, and the oil sector. In total, more than 20 projects of various calibers. Despite having over 100% workload every single day. And it seems that this year, I had more vacation than usual, yet still less than I could have taken. I traveled to Costa Rica, Mexico, Seattle, Antalya.

The point is, at each new place you learn something, sometimes from scratch. And that’s freaking awesome. It gives much more energy than if I had been “rooted” in any of these corporations for all 10 years. Perhaps, from a purely financial standpoint, people who stayed in one place at these companies earned more than me, but money isn’t the priority if it means sacrificing interest and enthusiasm. Living life at a job from which you are utterly exhausted is a questionable pleasure.

Last year at EPAM was maximally intense, and I sincerely hope that 2026 will not slow down.

Arbitrage Adventures: A Glimpse into Venezuela’s Currency Chaos | January 04 2026, 17:10

I first looked at a map of Venezuela around 15 years ago when you could fly there from Russia for a couple hundred dollars. I studied the map but never used it (though perhaps I should have).

At that time, it was the era of wild currency arbitrage, where the difference between the official bolivar rate “from the TV” and the real price on the black market reached astronomical proportions.

The scheme was simply brilliant: within the country, all airlines were required to sell tickets for local currency at the government rate. If an international flight cost a thousand dollars, it was converted into bolivars at the “pretty” official rate. But if you came off the street with a stack of real dollars and exchanged them at a money changer, the sum in bolivars needed to purchase the same ticket cost just a real hundred dollars, and sometimes even fifty.

The real fun began when intermediaries or acquaintances within the country got involved. You could book a ticket online through a local office, pay for it in bolivars through someone in Caracas, and then simply give them cash dollars when meeting, or transfer to a foreign account. The savings were so absurd that people flew business class simply because it was cheaper than lunch at Miami airport.

But cheap tickets were just the tip of the iceberg, because there was also something known as “raspao”. The state gave every traveler the right to buy a couple of thousand dollars at the cheap official rate on a credit card for spending abroad. Eventually, people bought cheap tickets, flew to the nearest islands, cashed in their currency quota, and returned home virtually rich, having sold these dollars on the black market for many times more.

Of course, this bonanza could not last forever and very quickly ended with a loud crash. Airlines quickly realized that their accounts were filled with millions of worthless-bolivars, which the government flatly refused to exchange for real currency. Planes flew half-empty, although all seats were officially bought out for currency quotas, and the government’s debts to carriers grew to billions of dollars, after which global giants simply began to massively leave the market.

But it worked for a while. I don’t remember exactly, somewhere between 2011 and 2014.

How such a breakdown between the official and unofficial rates lasted so long is beyond comprehension. The government could not quickly abolish the official rate because it supported imports of food and medicine. As soon as they acknowledged the real dollar rate, prices in stores would have skyrocketed immediately (which later happened). Flight tickets merely became a “collateral hole” in the system that everyone used while it was possible.

The Unintended Consequences of Misguided Incentives | January 04 2026, 13:30

About KPIs. In English, there’s a concept called perverse incentive, “a harmful stimulus.” It occurs when you try to quash evil, but the methods become the perfect fertilizer for it. There’s a saying, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” (Marilyn Strathern based on Goodhart’s Law).

A classic example is the “Cobra Effect.” In colonial India, the British decided to reduce the snake population and offered a reward for every head. The plan seemed as reliable as a Swiss watch until Indians began breeding cobras on farms for the “harvest.” When the authorities realized they were being duped and cancelled the payments, the farmers simply released the now-useless snakes into the wild. As a result, there were many more cobras than before the program started 🙂

In a similar way, the French in Hanoi battled rats by paying money for severed tails. The city became overrun with lively yet tailless rats: the Vietnamese cut off the “currency” and released the creatures to breed further, to not lose a stable income.

In the 19th century, archaeologists searching for dinosaur bones and ancient fossils paid locals for every piece found. As a result, resourceful diggers intentionally shattered whole, priceless skeletons into small pieces to earn more by submitting them separately. Science wept, but the KPI for “number of finds” soared. A similar tragedy occurred with the Dead Sea Scrolls: Bedouins cut the found scrolls into small pieces to sell each fragment separately.

In the USA, this malady struck infrastructure. When building the Transcontinental Railroad, the government paid Union Pacific subsidies for every mile laid. In Nebraska, engineers, in a single corrupt impulse, drew a huge loop—the Oxbow Route. The extra 9 miles of detour made no sense for logistics but brought the builders hundreds of thousands of dollars “out of thin air.”

But if the “loop” in Nebraska was just theft, then the mistakes of U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were a tragedy. An aficionado of numbers and mathematical models, he tried to manage the Vietnam War like a Ford assembly line.

When General Edward Lansdale timidly noted that McNamara’s formulas lacked the variable “the spirit and will of the Vietnamese people,” the secretary noted it in pencil in his notebook. And then erased it. He said that if something cannot be measured, it’s unimportant. The main metric became the body count. Officers onsite, eager to curry favor, began labeling everyone indiscriminately as “enemies,” painting an illusion of imminent victory in Washington, while the actual situation spiraled into the abyss.

In science, there’s a radical principle similar to Occam’s Razor— “Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword” (also known as “Alder’s Razor”). Its essence: if something cannot be tested by experiment (or measurement), it’s not even worthy of discussion.

It sounds reasonable for physics, but in life, it’s a direct path to what sociologist Daniel Yankelovich called the degradation of perception. He described this as a descent through four steps:

1. First, we measure only what is easy to measure.

2. Then we ignore what is difficult to measure or requires qualitative assessment.

3. The third step—we decide that what cannot be measured is not so important.

4. And the final step—we declare that what cannot be measured actually does not exist.

And at that moment, we become blind. We view the world through the keyhole of metrics, while in the room behind the door, cobras are bred, dinosaur bones are broken, and wars are lost.